Art: Designing Man

In the past 20 years, industrial designers have become a self-conscious
coterie, well paid and well content with their mission : to save
mankind from ugliness in man-made products. The work of such men as
Henry Dreyfuss, Ward Bennett and Raymond Loewy in Manhattan and Eero
Saarinen (who is both architect and designer) in Detroit has raised
industrial design from a mechanical slough of vulgarity. For in the
early years of mass production, the sound design of artisans gave way
to the cheaply pretentious. The craftsmanlike simplicity of early
American furniture was displaced...